


peace and hope; hope and peace

by PsychicBananaSplit



Series: after klaus got out of the mausoleum [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Ben isn't done yet, Boys Kissing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Never forgot the Mausoleum Incident, Painting, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Protective Klaus Hargreeves, Reading, Sad, The Author Regrets Nothing, The Mausoleum Incident, then happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 12:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17898197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychicBananaSplit/pseuds/PsychicBananaSplit
Summary: klaus reminisces memories of he and ben after his funeral





	peace and hope; hope and peace

**Author's Note:**

> i stayed up last night to get this finished, and didn't even finish it until now.

“I miss you, you know that,” Klaus slurred. “I mean, you know fucking everything, don’t you?”

Ben’s statue stared back at him coldly. It was carved with Ben having been in the blazer.  _ The fucking blazer with the fucking Umbrella Academy emblem on it, the motherfucking shiteating cheeky fucking bastard. _

“You never really liked these costumes.” Klaus gestured to what he was wearing, then to Ben. The statue. Not talking, breathing, living, heart-beating Ben.  _ Fuck, he’s really gone. _ “You always said they were too stiff for you. Like the rubber suits.”  _ They were too constricting, too choking. Klaus almost couldn’t breath.  _

“I know,” he choked, goddamn son of a bitch voice crack. “I know, that you probably didn’t know this. But,” he paused. He was really drunk. He might not even mean this. It might all be fake, to cope. “But, I really  _ fucking  _ love you, Ben,” he took a deep breath. It didn’t help the decreasing amount of air in his lungs. “I don’t know why you won’t come back to me.” 

A swig from the bottle. A drag to fill the empty parts of himself with smoke. Breathing it out. 

“But you don’t  _ really care,  _ now,  _ do you _ ? I mean,” he abruptly stood up and stretched. “I wouldn’t blame you.”

It was rainy. Gray skies, gray water, gray ground. Ben liked rainy days. All the cool, blueish colours calmed him. Also, there was less outdoor, or physical, training. More time to read, or to paint. Ben liked painting. Another reason he liked rainy days; he liked the landscapes. They all looked horribly dreary to Klaus, but Ben always saw the hidden beauty in things, didn’t he?

Klaus saw what Ben saw in rainy days. It wasn’t cheery, or happy, or calm, really. It was sorrowful, and lonely, and  _ distant _ . Maybe that’s why Ben liked to paint them. He was never really good at conveying emotion through words, rather than actions. No wonder he had stopped when Klaus had begun to visit him much more throughout the night.

Ben was the bookish, quiet, artsy one of the family. No doubt, he was smart. Genius, in fact. Maybe not so in math (that was Five’s thing), but, name any word, he would know the meaning. Name any poem title, he would recite the whole thing. He was good at theories. That’s about the only thing that he and Five had in common. While Five was mathematical and logical, Ben was linguistic and creative. 

You’d think that Ben and Five would have been close. Being smarties and all. But, quite the contrary, they would always get into arguments in sibling voting. So, being the quietest one, he was the last to vote, and always the tiebreaker. He almost never agreed with Five. 

Klaus guessed that that was what drew him to Ben. His tentativeness, but the firm stay on his ground. Regardless of what anyone would say, Ben was no pushover. And he admired that. 

Klaus remembers a time that neither of them will forget. Ever. 

Ben had been sick that day, and no one would check up on him. It was cruel. All day, when he would walk down the hall, he would hear quiet groans and whimpers from his door. So, naturally, he stayed up past curfew to walk to Ben’s room and make him feel better. Ben had been shaking, shivering and sweating, and jerked his head back frantically when Klaus opened the door. 

_ “You shouldn’t be here,”  _ Ben whispered, urgent eyes meeting his own.  _ “It’s…. Dangerous. Get out.” _

Klaus recalls that he just stood there, like a lump on a pickle, until Ben had given up and allowed him to crawl into bed with him. Ben was warm, Klaus was not. He was cold. Freezing. Like the dead, perhaps? No, no no. He wouldn’t be like one of those corpses, forever in his mind. 

But, he need not worry about the ghosts in his closet tonight. Ben would protect him, as he would protect Ben. 

They both woke up at midnight, when Ben’s insistent shaking had stopped. They sat up and talked in hushed voices for a while. Regular things. ‘ _ I wonder if this is what Allison and Luther do in the middle of the night’  _ earned a giggle from Klaus, who was still half asleep. 

The next night, they did it again. Ben’s shaking didn’t start again, though, so Klaus really had no other reason to be there. At some point, an unhealthy obsession began, and soon they both couldn’t sleep without the other. 

Once, when they were thirteen, Klaus went away on a mission. Alone. Ben couldn’t sleep that night; he felt that there was something wrong. Deep, deep down inside of him. When Klaus came back the next day, he looked ghastly. The circles that were ever prominent around his eyes were darker. His eyes, dimmer. He looked dead. Not ironically. 

That was when he had started distancing himself from everyone. When he met two other people to comfort him. Drugs, and alcohol.

Ben couldn’t possibly blame him. 

 

“Hey.”

Klaus turned around. A dark figure in a very familiar black leather jacket standing in the corner. Almost like a kitten meeting a human for the first time, it carefully stepped from the shadows, revealing a very familiar face with the familiar jacket and the familiar body build.  _ Is it really him?  _ Yes. It is. 

“Hey.” Klaus looked at him up and down. “You look well. For, you know, dying.”

Ben flinched. “Yeah, right.”

 

_ “Kiss me,”  _ Klaus had said. High as the sky, drunk enough to fill the entire ocean. Ben couldn’t care less, in his moment of spontané. Their lips smashed together in a flurried motion of desperation and impulse. 

 

“You’d think that you would summon me sooner, Klaus. I missed you, too.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> kinda happy, i guess. i don't know anymore, guys.


End file.
